The exemplary embodiment relates to machine translation and finds particular application in an authoring system that provides a user interface through which a user is guided to author a source text that is translated to a target language with improved quality and accuracy.
A common task in multilingual work environments is to compose messages in a language in which the author is not fluent. As an example, the customer service operations of multinational companies serve a multilingual customer base. To serve their customers, customer service agents may be organized into language desks, with each desk serving requests in a particular language. However, it is generally impractical to hire sufficient agents to provide agents who are fluent in all languages served by the customer service center. In addition, when there is an unexpected surge in the number of requests in a particular language, this may cause long delays in response times.
One way to solve these problems is to enable agents to handle multilingual requests using Machine Translation (MT) technology. Machine translation can be used effectively by customer service agents to interpret incoming requests in an unfamiliar language. Translations generated by current MT technology are often good enough for understanding the customer's message, even if they do not constitute a perfect translation or are not perfectly written. On the other hand, since MT is error-prone, it is often considered unsuitable to be used directly for composing replies to be sent to customers by the agents that are not fluent in the customer's language. Sending an erroneous or non-fluent message may not be well-received by the customers and may harm the company's reputation. Existing systems for computer-assisted translation assume that the users are fluent in both the source and target languages or at least have access to a translator who is fluent in both languages, which is not always the case.
One solution is for the output of the MT system to undergo a post-editing process before the reply is sent to the customer. That is, a person who is fluent in both the agent's and the customer's languages (source and target languages) reviews and edits the agent's message before it is sent. Such a post-editing step, which entails having knowledge of the target language, is generally too time consuming and not cost effective for service centers where many messages are being sent back and forth.
Various approaches have been developed to assist writers in producing multilingual documents. Dymetman, et al., proposed a Multilingual Document Authoring (MDA) system to provide interactive tools, such as context-aware menus, for assisting monolingual writers in the production of multilingual XML documents. See, Marc Dymetman, Veronika Lux, and Aarne Ranta, “XML and multilingual document authoring: Convergent trends,” in COLING, pp. 243-249. Morgan Kaufmann, 2000. This system makes use of parallel grammars to compose text in two languages simultaneously, while assuming that the author has knowledge of a single language. U.S. Pat. No. 6,163,785 to Carbonell, et al., proposes a monolingual authoring tool to produce controlled language in the source language. Choumane, et al., provide interactive assistance to the author for reducing ambiguity in the source text, based on a set of manually defined rules. This assumes that reducing ambiguity will potentially yield a better translation. See, Ali Choumane, Hervé Blanchon, and Cécile Roisin, “Integrating translation services within a structured editor,” Proc. 2005 ACM Symp. on Document Engineering, pp. 165-167.
However, templates or rules which have been tailored for one system may not be suitable for another, and the actual MT system being used and its models are not taken into account.
There remains a need for a system and method which allows authors to construct text in a target language in which they are not fluent.